With that said, you can imagine how excited I was when I came across Dashing, a Sinatra based framework that lets you build beautiful dashboards. However my excitement was short lived when, while I was working on my home dashboard (weather, RSS feeds, the daily Dilbert cartoon), I discovered the RSS widget I was using wouldn’t pull in feeds from StackOverflow. [Read more…]

Growth hacking is a marketing technique that blends creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to gain exposure and sell products. Put another way, growth hacking is concerned with using data and the insights gained from data to get more exposure (marketing) and sell more products (sales) while keeping costs low and revenues high.

Part of my job as a data analyst is to create reports and send them to various people. I had already used Python 2.7 to automate the creation and sending of the reports using Gmail, however all the examples I found for Python 3 were either more complicated or simple than what I needed. Below is the code that will allow you to easily create an email with attachments and send it using Gmail, all with Python 3. [Read more…]

We’ve all seen the men and women in fashion magazines, who seem to make looking good easy. We’ve also seen how media companies manipulate photographs and cover models use steroids, giving we, the unknowing folk, a very incorrect perception of what it takes to “be healthy.”

One of the companies I respect and follow for their no-BS approach to health is Precision Nutrition. Recently the created in infographic showing just what you have to do, and stop doing, in order to get to different levels of body fat. For instance, the leaner you want to get the more you have to strategize on everything you eat. That can lead to trouble when you go out with friends. If you get to go out that is, due to the amount of time you spend in the gym.

When I started Data Wranglers DC less than a year ago, I did it so that hardcore data geeks had a place to help each other with their craft. It is said that 80-90% of all data projects are data wrangling. From experience I can say it’s almost more!

A huge thanks to the data community here in DC for making this meetup a success!

In retrospect there’s much you could have done differently. Things would be so much different today if you had only known what you now know. Life would be easier; you’d weigh less; you’d have more money. The list goes on… [Read more…]

According to Commander Mark Divine, a 20-year Navy Seal veteran and founder of SEALFIT, we are all capable of at least 20x more than we believe we’re capable of. That can be physical, mental, emotional, or any part of our lives. [Read more…]

Why I’m Here

I started this blog because I needed a place to put all the non-businessey things running through my mind, a place where I could post to my hearts content and be happy simply to publish my thoughts. That place is here, and I'm happy to have you here with me.